"The Lost Art of Mixing"

Bauermeister applied the Page 69 Test to The Lost Art of Mixing and reported the following:

It was a bit of a shock when I opened The Lost Art of Mixing to page 69 – its contents there only because of the vagaries of editing and typesetting – and found the small scene that had started the whole book going in my imagination.

I hadn’t planned on writing a sequel to The School of Essential Ingredients. I had sent the characters from that book off into their lives and I thought they would do well enough without me. But one day an image showed up in my head – Lillian, my chef, standing in the restaurant kitchen doorway inhaling the smells, just the way the first book started. Only this time, the smells overwhelmed her and she was realizing she was pregnant – unexpectedly and unsettlingly so.

The scene rattled around in my mind over the course of the next few years. I’d be thinking about a different, new character, and somehow he would know Lillian. I would go for a walk, inhale a new smell, and there would be that scene again, knocking at my imagination. I wrote a different book. The scene was still there waiting when I was done. And finally I was so curious I couldn’t stand it anymore and I started writing.